Movies

THE “HIGH SIGN”: Buster on the verge

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THE HIGH SIGN: Buster Keaton and the Blinking Buzzards flashing the gang sign

The High Sign is 20-minutes of Buster Keaton’s rapid-fire comedy from 1921. Buster plays a young man who cons his way into a job managing an amusement park shooting gallery and inadvertently becomes entangled with a murderous gang of thugs. The plot exists to set up two exquisite comic set pieces. In the first, Keaton sets up an elaborate Rube Goldberg device to trick the boss into believing that Keaton is a master marksman. And the second is a triumph of Keaton’s ingenuity, as the gang members chase him through a cutaway two-story house, complete with trap doors and secret passageways.

Of course the gang itself, the Blinking Buzzards, is ridiculous, especially when they flash their secret gang sign. There’s also humor in the contrast between the towering gang leader (6′ 3″ Joe Roberts) and the diminutive (5′ 5″) Keaton.

The High Sign is a two-reeler, a 20-minute short film.  The conventional wisdom among early movie studio heads was that a comedy could only be sustain audience interest for 20 minutes. Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd would soon dispel that myth.

In fact, The High Sign came just before Keaton unleashed his string of comic masterpiece features:  Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The General (1926), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) and The Cameraman (1928).  After The Cameraman, Keaton’s new studio took away his creative control, and his career (and personal life) crashed.

I saw The High Sign at Cinequest, accompanied by world-renowned Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer organ, before Steamboat Bill Jr.  I recommend Sal Pizarro’s excellent profile of Dennis James in the Mercury News.

Also known as The “High Sign”, the film plays occasionally on Turner Classic Movies and possibly bootleg versions can be streamed on YouTube and Vimeo.

Buster Keaton in THE HIGH SIGN

BRING ME AN AVOCADO: under pressure, relationships evolve

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BRING ME AN AVOCADO

In the indie drama Bring Me an Avocado, an Oakland mom goes into a coma, and her husband and two daughters must spend several months going on with their lives, not knowing whether the mom will wake up.  The mom’s sister and her BFF step up to support the family by helping out with cooking and childcare.  Of course, there’s a lot of pressure on this extended family, and the relationships between the three adults evolve and get complicated.

[MINOR SPOILER]  After months, the mom wakes up.  Things are not the same as before, and she decides, in an emotional catharsis, how the family will move forward.

Bring Me an Avocado is the first feature for writer-director Maria Mealla.  Anyone who writes a coma movie has to decide how the character gets in the coma without making it an obvious contrivance; Mealla’s solution rings authentic, an event that is horrific and absolutely plausible.

Sarah Burkhalter plays the mom, and her performance takes over the final ten minutes of the movie; her character pieces together what happened while she was comatose, processes it and acts on the future of her family.; Burkhalter makes the ending very powerful.  The child actors playing the daughters, California Poppy Sanchez and Michaela Robles, are superb.

I really wanted to like this Bay Area indie more than I did.  It runs 104 minutes, and would have been better film at 90 minutes – and without the musical interludes.    Not all of the cast is as strong as are Burkhalter and the kids.  And [MINOR SPOILER] , it’s distracting when the mom spends months in a coma without any wasting, waking up looking pretty hearty, with just a bandage on her back.

Cinequest hosted the world premiere of Bring Me an Avocado.

TABOO: the uncomfortable line between empathy and derision

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TABOO

Many will cringe at the promise of this episode of the Belgian reality show Taboo: humorist Philippe Geubels spends time with four dying people and then hosts an entire audience full of terminally ill people for his stand-up comedy show – about their situation. It’s surprisingly empathetic and touching.

OK, so if ever there was a Rorschach test of a television show, it’s Taboo. Each week, Geubels meets a series of folks with conditions and disabilities that put them outside the mainstream – amputees, the obese, little people, ethnic minorities, etc. Then he invites them to constitute the live audience of a comedy show in which he tells jokes about them. They love it.

Geubels is clearly running right through the taboo of making fun of the disabled and minorities. But is he laughing with them or at them? Is he showing them more empathy than those who are too uncomfortable to ever acknowledge their conditions? Is Geubels almost alone in making us look at these folks for who they are? Does it matter that Geubels’ humor is delivered face-to-face to his subjects?

Uneasy about how to discuss the disabled in this day and age?  Consult the National Center on Disability and Journalism’s Disability Language Style Guide.

I’m sure that some, perhaps many, audience members will be offended by Taboo. The politically correct will be offended without even watching the show. Others will embrace Geubels for his wit and intended empathy. For sure, there will be plenty of LOLs at the screening.

This Belgian TV show is mostly in the English language.  Cinequest hosts the North American premiere of Taboo in the television section of the fest.

WBCN AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: inventing a medium

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WBCN AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

There was a time before FM radio was a big deal, and a time when someone had to imagine it. A fairly conventional-appearing lawyer named Ray Rieman did just that in Boston, and started by assembling a team of colorful misfits.  Mirroring the counter-culture, these guys invented just about every aspect of the album-oriented FM radio that became ubiquitous in American cities within just a few years.The documentary WBCN and the American Revolution tells this story.

Rieman was an iconoclastic genius who faced new challenges daily.  For example, what happens if you run a radio station and your news director learns from the new wire that he has just been indicted for terrorism?

One of the less remembered aspects to hippie culture was that it was pretty sexist. That’s how WBCN started out, but these guys were very open to change, especially after local women listeners delivered a pointed gift of live baby chicks to the station.

We see WBCN’s impressive set of firsts – the first alternative radio news show, the first female rock DJs, the first gay radio show, and the first time that Bruce Springsteen was live on the radio, along with Patti Smith’s obscenity-laced poetry.

Of course, WBCN and the American Revolution is a time capsule, rekindling vivid memories for Baby Boomer and serving as an excellent cultural history for those younger,

Cinequest is hosting the world premiere of WBCN and the American Revolution.

THE WAY YOU LOOK TONIGHT: an amiable parable

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THE WAY YOU LOOK TONIGHT

In the amiable comedy The Way You Look Tonight, Peter meets a woman through a dating app, but can’t find her again despite their connection and a torrid one-nighter.  Still yearning for his mystery flame, he dates a series of women, but remains unfulfilled.  Now, it’s hard to write about this movie without spoiling the hook, but let’s just say that he discovers that a group of people exist with a startling fictional condition.

Indeed, the two funniest sequences are when Peter finds out that he is the last human to find out about this condition and when he attends the support group for the afflicted (of COURSE they have one).

Nick Fink is appealing as Peter and the rest of the cast is uniformly excellent, especially the horde of actresses who play his dates.

Can someone get past appearance –  age, race, body type – to connect with a soul mate?  The Way You Look Tonight is actually a parable cloaked in a romantic comedy.  This is the first feature for writer-director John Cerrito.

Cinequest hosts the world premiere of The Way You Look Tonight

VANILLA: rich in character-driven humor

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Kelsea Bauman-Murphy and appendage in VANILLA

In the winning comedy Vanilla, Elliot (Will Dennis) is stuck in a regimented life of coding software, emerging from his apartment only for gym workouts and food.  Kimmie (Kelsea Bauman-Murphy) is a kookie free spirit, but she’s stuck, too, unable to fulfill her aspiration to become a stand-up comic.  Events conspire to lead the two into a three-day road trip from New York to New Orleans.  Kimmie pitches it to Elliot as a date.  But Elliot really sees the chance to reconnect in New Orleans with his ex-girlfriend Samantha, for whom he still pining. What could go wrong?

We have an odd couple on the road, so funny stuff happens – and this is a funny movie.  Naturally, the audience is waiting for the two to jump into bed together.  But Vanilla is fundamentally a portrait of these two people, both comfortable in their ruts.  Elliot is posing as an entrepreneur, and Kimmie is posing as a comedian-in-the-making; something is going to have to shake up these two so each can grow.  Kimmie seems utterly intrepid, but we learn that she can be paralyzed by self-consciousness, just like Elliot.

Vanilla is written and directed by its star, Will Dennis, in his first feature film.  It’s an impressive debut, rich in character-driven humor.

Dennis understands not to linger on a gag; (Yorgos Lanthimos should pay close attention to this).  Dennis has Elliot try to eat a beignet in a bayou tour boat; it only works because it’s the briefest of gags.    There’s a montage of bad would-be comics at an open mic night that is brilliant in its understanding of why they think they’re funny and why they’re not.  Dennis also works in a random encounter with America’s most earnest fish store guy (Lowell Landes).  And “Anyone ever tell you that you have a Natalie Portman thing going on?” becomes a very funny come-on line.

Dennis is very good as Elliot, subtly capturing his unease, judginess and pathetic obsession with Samantha.  Bauman-Murphy makes Kimmie’s kookiness, which could easily be annoying, lovable.

Jo Firestone is perfect as Elliot’s ex Samantha.   Firestone shows us a glimpse of why Elliot would fall for her, and then a massive dose of why she’s bad for him.  Let’s just say that I recognized Samantha (as a friend’s ex-girlfriend, not mine).

The satisfying ending of Vanilla is authentic, true to the characters and NOT what would be expected from a run-of-the-mill rom com.

Cinequest hosts the world premiere of Vanilla, where Silicon Valley audiences will appreciate Elliot’s delusion that his clunky app will go viral – if only users would spend enough time learning it.

TRAVEL BAN: MAKING AMERICA LAUGH AGAIN: using comedy to explore the uncomfortable

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Comic Aron Kader in TRAVEL BAN: MAKE AMERICA LAUGH AGAIN

Since medieval court jesters tweaked royal courts, we’ve used comedy to explore difficult conversations.  In the documentary Travel Ban: Making America Laugh Again, comedians confront the misunderstanding, bigotry and hatred faced by Americans who are Muslim and by Americans whose families come from the Middle East.

One unfortunate aspect of our culture is the impatience with and resistance to accepting nuance and complication.  Many Americans are content to accept a world in which “the Middle East” is a nation – one entity that is ever-hostile to the United States and ever evil-intentioned to all Americans.

Muslims and Middle Easterners have always endured negative stereotypes, made worse by 9/11.  But, this has worsened in the Trump Era because Trump empowers and licenses the open spewing of hate speech into our national discourse.

In response, Comics Aron Kader, Raz Jobrani and Ahmed Ahmed, who performed on the Arabian Knights and Axis of Evil comedy tours, mobilized even more stand-up comics for the Travel Ban tour.

Travel Ban includes the on-stage and off-stage banter of over a dozen American comics of Middle Eastern heritage or Muslim religion.  As one would expect, some are far funnier than others. My favorite is Feraz Ozel, who also has the movie’s funniest line in response to “Why don’t the good Muslims get together and fight the bad Muslims?”  (You’ll have to watch the movie for to get the devastating punchline.

Travel Ban is NOT purely a concert film; we do see performances, but the comics also discuss their experiences off-stage.  For context, there are some bracing videos of actual hate crimes and hateful rants by ignorant “real Americans”.  And Travel Ban brings in some key factual tidbits; for example, zero Americans have been killed by anyone from any of the countries targeted by Trump’s travel ban.

This is a serious film with some hilarious comedy.   As one of the comics says off-stage, “a good comedian makes people laugh, a great comedian makes them think”.

Cinequest hosts the world premiere of Travel Ban: Making America Laugh Again.

https://vimeo.com/292645468

TABOO: the uncomfortable line between empathy and making funny

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TABOO

Many will cringe at the promise of the Belgian reality show Taboo:  humorist Philippe Geubels spends time with four dying people and then hosts an entire audience full of terminally ill people for his stand-up comedy show – about their situation. It’s surprisingly empathetic and touching.

Cinequest hosts the North American premiere of Taboo in the television section of the fest.  Taboo is likely to be one of the most controversial – and one of the most popular – entries in the festival. My complete review will appear when Taboo is released in the US.

STEAMBOAT BILL, JR.: silent comedy, still at its best

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STEAMBOAT BILL, JR.

Every year, through the sponsorship of the Stanford Theatre Foundation, Cinequest presents a silent film. This year’s choice is Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr.

Keaton plays a wimpy young man returning home from college to help his father, who operates an old-fashioned and weathered paddle steamer. The father is burly and testosterone-fueled – and immediately aghast at his effete and callow son. The business is threatened by competition from a magnate’s newer, more well-equipped riverboat. Comic situations ensue from the business rivalry, a Romeo-and-Juliet subplot and the odd couple pairing of father and son.

But it’s all just the launching pad for Keaton’s comic genius, with its irresistible combination of deadpan slapstick and daring physical stunts. Steamboat Bill, Jr. contains one of the greatest movie stunts EVER – and one of the most dangerous – the entire front of a house blows over but fails to crush Buster because he emerges from a window opening.

Steamboat Bill, Jr. came in 1928 near the end of Keaton’s greatest work: Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The General (1926) and The Cameraman (1928). After The Cameraman, Keaton’s new studio took away his creative control, and his career (and personal life) crashed.

I also recommend Peter Bogdanovich’s fine 2018 biodoc of Keaton, The Great Buster: A Celebration. It’s not yet streamable, but I expect it to be available soon.

Cinequest presents its silent films on the big screen of a period movie palace, the California Theatre, accompanied by world-renowned Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer organ. James traveled with Lillian Gish as accompanist when she would present movies. I recommend Sal Pizarro’s excellent profile of Dennis James in the Mercury News.

Cinequest will present Steamboat Bill, Jr. along with the 20 minute Keaton short The High Sign (which I haven’t yet seen).

A SHELTER AMONG THE CLOUDS: a simple man regards the rest of humanity

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A SHELTER AMONG THE CLOUDS

“People love God but not each other,” observes Besnik, the protagonist of the Albanian drama A Shelter Among the Clouds. It’s a simple sentiment from a simple man, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t profound.

Besnik tends a herd of goats in a mountainous village that is remote even by Albanian standards. A devout Muslim, Besnik is more spiritual than most people. He discovers an ancient Christian mural in the ancient local mosque. That makes him a hero to the village Catholics, but the new development is very unwelcome to his imam. All of the villagers  – Catholic and Muslim – are suspicious of the team of experts sent by the national government to study and restore his discovery.

Besnik has been caring for his dying father, and when his Greek Orthodox brother and Muslim sister return to visit and to position themselves over the upcoming inheritance, things get tense.  In contrast to the remarkable landscape beauty of the harsh mountains, small mindedness and selfishness abound with most of the locals and within Besnik’s family. The guileless Besnik is baffled when people react less generously than the Koran prescribes.

This is a visually beautiful exploration of human behavior. Arben Bajraktaraj delivers a pure performance as Besnik. Writer-director Robert Budina, with his second feature, has delivered a moving and beautiful film. Note: This is an especially unhurried film, so settle in and let it wash over you.

Cinequest is hosting the North American premiere of A Shelter Among the Clouds, one of the World Cinema highlights of this year’s festival.